Theatre, film and music reviews – strongly opinionated!

Film review: Dunkirk (Director: Christopher Nolan)

By Sascha Krieger

What a beginning: a few soldiers are roaming a deserted street, peep into windows, look at the fliers sailing down from a peaceful sky. Suddenly a shot. One of the soldiers collapses. They start running. More shots. One by one they fall. With one exception: a very young soldier jumping over a fence, running until he reaches a beach. Vast. Full of people waiting. Waiting to be rescued from this deadly prison the town has become. This is how Dunkirk opens, Christopher Nolan’s film about one of the turning points of the Second World War. When after being stranded in the northern French town of Dunkirk, completely surrounded by German troops closing in, 350,000 mostly British soldiers were evacuated, this giving Britain the basis to continue and eventually win the war. A miracle many call it.

„A gay fantasia on national themes“: the subtitle of Tony Kushner’s two-part take on an America at a watershed moment of history – between AIDS epidemic and end of the Cold War – hints at the scope of what is arguably one of the most significant plays of the 1990s. Opening in 1993 and 1994, respectively, the wounds are still visible, the pain still fresh. The death of certainties, the dread of an approaching apocalypse – the threat of a nuclear war was still real in 1985 when the play takes place while the environmental threats such as the vanishing ozone layer started getting mass attention – found expression in Kushner’s panorama of lost people questioning their identities, drifting along in the search for meaning, lashing out against the loss of the old world order. Built around a young man battling with AIDS, the loosely and sometimes bizarrely connected personnel are like explorers in a hostile and unknown universe who have to find their way mostly without help while longing for the closeness and warmth and support they all seem to have lost. With the arrival of the supernatural, an Angelic sphere that’s lost its God, the view widens to the universal. Humankind has to find their own way, no God will help, the angels being as lost as those they mean to protect.

Oh, yes, there surely is something wrong in the state of Denmark. When Robert Icke’s celebrated production of Hamlet opens, we see: screens. TV footage from the late king’s funeral, later the new king smiling into the cameras, a multitude of CCTV images. Whether security or media: surveillance is everwhere in this production – as it is in the play. For, isn’t Hamlet a long succession of people spying on each other, hasn’t the royal court at Elsinore always been a surveillance state? So, transporting the story of the grieving prince, trying but failing to revenge his slain father, into an age in which the camera eye is always present, in which fear and attention are the twin driving forces leading to a society in which everyone is transparent as glass, feels rather logical. And Angus Wright’s nonchalantly plain Claudius is a perfect present-day ruler: agreeable enough, not a sore sight when smiling into the cameras, he’s an accomplished politician, slick, charming, an astute user of the media, a fine political instinct, a ruthless opportunist who knows how to play the fear card. He hardly ever gets loud, he doesn’t have to. He has the power to pull the strings and he does so in a chillingly efficient way.

Conor McPherson (Music & Lyrics by Bob Dylan): Girl from the North Country, The Old Vic, London (Director: Conor McPherson)

By Sascha Krieger

It’s probably the kind of phone call you never expect getting even when you’ve been an accomplished playwright for the better part of 20 years. When the record company of the most celebrated songwriter of the 20th century call, a man, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, a cultural icon, the stuff of legends and myths, appropriated or rejected by pretty much every social and cultural movement of the past 50 years, when they ask you if you’d be interested in using the man’s songs in an original play, what do you say? The initial response of Conor McPherson, a son of Dublin, Ireland, was no. Then he thought about it. And thought some more. And now, some four years later, the Girt from the North Country has been born on the stage of the Old Vic. So what’s to expect from a show built around Dylan’s prolific songbook? A musical weaving a this story around them to make them shine, Mamma-Mia-style? A glorified greatest hits concert with a bit of drama added to justify the ticket price? An attempt to filter a story out of the songs that tries to go beyond them but will always take second place? The answer is: none of the above. Girl from the North Country is a masterful play in its own right, conversing with the Minnesota bard’s music not being subservient to them, a symbiosis of play and songs, of words and music that turns out to be a lot more than the sum of its parts.

About twenty years ago, the theatre world was swept by a new energy infusion courtesy of a few „young and wild“ playwrights from both sides of the Irish sea. Authors such as Mark Ravenhill, David Harrower or Martin Crimp put a high-paced hyper-reality on stage that was part unpolished, raw, previously hidden life, the life of a youth not recognised, not noticed, discarded, and part rhythmic celebration, a vertigo of lust and longing and violence, a rush of adrenaline and every puberty-driving hormone imaginable. The Irish voice – and perhaps its most radical one, too – of this „generation“ was Cork playwright. Enda Walsh. Long before he was dabbling with musicals, he gave us Disco Pigs: a wild, unique trip into the state of emergency that is the teenage brain and body. In it, two 17-year-olds, inseparable since their births at exactly the same time, drift, dance and punch themselves through their shared birthday. They do so in what seems like a long feverish dream, a rhythmic song, a drug-induced trip that will change their symbiotic relationship forever. Part Cork accent, part private fantasy language, part fairy tale between beat-style poetry and rhythmic prose, part energy-rich chamber play, Disco Pigs was an unashamed ride through unfulfilled longing, the despair that leads to people seeking someone to hold on to, the darkness that awaits those living on the side of the moon sunlight will never reach.

Of course, it’s hard not to think of Trump Tower. Instead of a 1950s Mississippi plantation mansion, Benedict Andrews‘ take on Tennessee Williams‘ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is located in front of a massive gilded wall, courtesy of Swiss set designer Magda Willi. This is a golden cage Williams‘ characters are caught in and it’s one clearly place in the here and now (as proven by the frequent use of mobile phones). A neon rectangle frames the stage which in itself is a rectangular island in a sea of shiny nothingness. All is polished, all is a lie. The setting – only a (black!) bed, a shower and a cosmetics table plus a few bottles of whiskey and a bag of ice are left as remnants of the real world – feels like a mixture of Beckettian emptiness and the all-surface world of reality TV. Where in Beckett everything beyond the stage is nothingness, here it’s the horror of the greed-ridden, image-based reality of today’s late-stage capitalism inhabited by cloned child monsters half Chucky half beauty pageant. And by adults that seem more like mechanical puppets, robots of the eternal hamster wheel of success.